Ep. 135 Business Blueprints Lessons From Leaders with Matthew Toth of C3
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Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your sales growth. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of Sales Engineering at Telarus, and this is Next Level BizTech.
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We are bringing back a track by popular demand called Business Blueprint Lessons from Leaders. Today on with us, we have got Matthew Toth, founder and president of C3. Matthew, welcome on, buddy.
Thanks for having me, Josh.
We got a lot to unpack here, man. We were just chatting before and realized we got to hit the record button. So let’s jump into it. First of all, let’s just start us off. Give us the origin story, personal background, anything unique, how you got into this space and kind of what the path was along the way.
Oh, goodness. I hope you got a little bit.
It’s maybe the I think the story is interesting or maybe it’s just interesting to me. I don’t know. I guess you can you can figure that one out. I started in 2000 at this crazy company called WorldCom. And for all of these old school telecom people that are out there, they’ll go, oh, gosh, he’s one of those people. But I started at this company
as it was coming down from its height. So this guy named Bernie Ebers had been inflating stock earnings and had been essentially lying people to inflate his stock to buy other companies. And I did this big, long speech on it last year. I think the number is like it was like in in six years and 72 months, they acquired 66 companies,
66 companies. That’s one a month easy for for six years. And I came in just as they’re wrapping up the last of these like of all of these mergers and acquisitions. There’s so many systems and there’s so many people. It’s kind of chaos. It’s a little bit cast. But me being 22 years old, I didn’t know anything. So I know less than nothing. Like I am like, you know, I am fresh out of school. So I spent two and a half years there. And before starting C3, I spent about eight and a half years. Well, I’ll focus on this for a moment.
And you saw all the you saw all these things that are these these warning tales of like, hey,
people are replaceable,
change comp plans.
We’re just going to buy our way into being a bigger company.
And you saw this maniacal focus on quarterly results and stuff. And it was just and I’ll never forget, you know, be the 31st of the month. And, you know, someone just shows up at a project manager and says, oh, here you go. Here are 10 forms for random products and project managers. Look at the salesperson goes, what the hell is all this? You know, that’s an order. And she goes, two thirds of this stuff isn’t even filled out properly. Hey, I did my job. This is your problem now.
And I thought to myself, I can I can more accurately describe it now. But I saw this as imagine a gigantic machine, a series of gears. And every time someone does this, they put a little grain of sand into one of those gears.
And you know what? You can get away with that for for a while. But there’s going to be one day when all of a sudden this big machine or one of these gears just stops working. But you will never know what grain of sand it was that was ultimately the one that broke that thing. But if you have all these things in your organization that happen all the time, all you’re doing is throwing one little grain of sand at a time into this gear, into the into these gears, into this machine. And only when you ultimately leave that place and you can stand back and see the craziness of it, because like you don’t really think about, you know, the fog of war when you’re in the middle of it. You only think about it like after you get back out of it. You’re like, that was crazy. Like that, by the way, I’m a swear. So I’m going to I’m going to keep the swearing to a zero today. So I want to swear so badly because the start of my strong, not strong, be strong. I got it. But I walked into that building.
And there was like 100, 120 people that worked there when I started. And when I left,
there were more people, excuse me, there were more offices than people. So even a guy that was 24 years old had like a big office. Why? Because we still had this big office space. It’s not because I deserved an office, but it just hit me. I was like, this is pretty sad. Like there is ultimately my company file for bankruptcy, WorldCom file for bankruptcy. They got acquired by Verizon. It was Verizon had to dig through this massive company that they ultimately ended up acquiring. And like that was my entry. And by the way, that’s the Reader’s Digest version of this whole story. That was my entry into this crazy world. And it was that was for about about two, two and a half years.
And I was just like, and as I as I go through these experiences, these eight and a half years, I’ll get into more of these in a moment. It’s so funny because I learn about what I should do to be an entrepreneur and to be a leader. But I probably learn more about what not to do.
And it’s this interesting mix. I’ve met wonderful people along the way, but I’ve also met so many people with this soulless pursuit of more.
And it just I keep I almost kept this mental inventory of all the things I do and don’t want to do when I grow up. And I still haven’t grown up. So so I spend two, two and a half years there. I went to Sprint and after that and at Sprint, Sprint had just merged with Nextel. And for everyone that’s over the age of 40, somebody would have a phone that would go, and they’d have these conversations out loud. It was just like you could talk. I it was a thing. Just look it up. It was magical.
It was supposed to be the next greatest thing. I.
Oh, yeah. It’s it’s on the Internet somewhere.
So I spent a year there and it was tumultuous and it was like they had almost forgotten about the division of the company that I worked on, which was the wireline part.
And it was the second example of a company that was more focused on acquiring other companies than actually its employees, its product set, its culture. It was just going to grow and finance its way to the top.
So I spent a year there. And when I left there, I was so beaten down. I was like, I don’t know if I’m good at this anymore.
It was like it was just really it was it was difficult. So I then actually went to a company Quest Q W E S. T. A lot of folks in this space have spent some time there.
And I spent five years there and it was a wonderful five years. The last year and a half or so, I had a boss who I just didn’t see eye to eye with, you know, and no matter how good you are at your job,
you know, you just sometimes run to people you don’t get you just don’t get along with.
So he asked me to do a few things I didn’t agree with and I decided to strike it out on my own. I’ll never forget going to my biggest customer I had sold at Quest that held a relationship on, held on to even after starting going into leadership. And I just went to him. I just said, you know what, I’m thinking about starting a company and I don’t have a lot of bills at home. But if you said that you go with me, I think I’ll start this company. And if you say no, I don’t know. I don’t know if I will. Odds are a little bit less. I’ll never forget it. The guy said, Matthew, we’re with Quest because we’re with you. And I was and it was a lightning bolt. It was a lightning bolt moment.
And I and at this very moment, I said, oh, my gosh, I’m going to start a company.
And there was no doubt. There is absolutely no doubt. And at that very moment in time.
I thought to myself, I’m never going to work for anyone else ever again. And I’m going to make this work because for eight and a half years, I’d worked for folks with the solace pursuit of more. I’ve been a little bit burned towards the end of my quest tenure with the leader I’d been working with. I just said, you know what, even if it’s only myself working out of, you know, in my living room, this is what I want to do.
And it just so happened that that was November of 2008. Now, if you want to go look at their history books again, that is a kind of a poopy time to go start a company. So everyone’s like, are you sure about the wisdom of this? Like, you just go get another job, kind of ride out this massive storm that no one’s seen since the Great Depression.
But that was what I was going to do. And I had this one company that I thought I could get a few more of my clients. But I thought to myself, I can at least pay my bills with this with this one company’s this one company’s commissions. So I started this company in 2008. Never forget the first 14 months of working. I made like I think I made twenty two thousand dollars, but I like I had saved up some money and I’m like, nope, this is it. There’s no turning back. There is you are burning the ships. That is it.
And that was the start of my journey. And when I started this thing, I thought there’s going to be one or two things that’s going to happen. It’s going to be one. I’m going to work this thing by myself forever and ever. Or maybe the second one is maybe I’ll hire a few people. We’ll see how it goes. But, you know, the first few years, it’s just like, hey, you’re trying to get any pennies in the door. You know, you’re trying to get anything going. You just got to get some momentum going. You know, Jim Collins talks about this thing called the flywheel. And imagine this thing that’s two thousand pounds. And all you’re trying to do is just push it an inch because the second inch is a little bit easier than the first one. So all I’m focusing on, forget about hiring people and forget about all this stuff. Like I just got to get some momentum going. I busted my ass for a good I think it was three, three and a half years before I ended up bringing on somebody else.
And that like when I started actually hiring people, I was thinking to myself, what kind of company would I want to have? What kind of leader do I want to be? What is important to me?
And that is where all of this stuff from my background came from. And it just like it just was just this wellspring of ideas. And why I could do this and I could avoid that. And if we had this person, this might not be the right thing.
And that I feel like C3 started from that, but has evolved since with all the folks that have come in. And honestly, and aren’t here anymore as well. So that’s the long version of my origin story.
I love it. You call out a couple of things that I want to bring back in there that I want to make sure people people don’t miss that I’ve heard in other great success stories. And I went through some of this, too. You know, you surround yourself with people. You think these are the people that are that are supposed to show you the way and teach you what to do. And you quickly realize and say, wait a minute, I think these guys are showing me examples of what not to do. So always recognize we need to recognize those in our life. Is this really somebody that’s going to guide me or is this somebody that’s going to pull me down? I think that was a great call out in that.
The second thing that you said, too, is that this was I was just listening to a thing on
Thomas Edison last night and kind of how he the maniacal creation process and kind of how he did what he did. And and the thought was similar similar track here was what you said is, you know, look at look at a way that something is being done and make a slight improvement on it. And there’s value in that. And you saw that value and you created that value. And that’s how many other I think things have been created is, gosh, how do people not realize that there’s a ton of value here, but we’re just doing these one or two dumb things like let’s just improve this. Right. So, you know, kudos to you for kind of seeing that that same track. And and here we are. Right.
And you can never turn that off, though, like that’s the whole key. It can’t be the thing that you do for the first year or two. It’s got to be the forever thing because, like, if you ever turn it off, you’ll end up getting past, you’ll end up getting lapped by everybody else. And I feel like that’s hard to do. And it’s a reason why I think a lot of folks I don’t want to bag on people because, like, a lot of money has been offered. There’s PE money in this space. And that’s wonderful. But there are folks that it’s so consuming. It consumes energy and emotion and your time to continually have that. And if you don’t have that, it almost makes sense to sell the organization to somebody that will have that. But it is you have you have to continue to have that or it doesn’t work out ultimately. For sure.
For sure. All right. Let’s let’s flip it now. Let’s talk a little bit about C3. You know, you guys, you guys are a fantastic partner. You’ve grown a great business out there. Talk to us about just, you know, who C3 is. How do you stand out all that good stuff?
So there are about 40 of us were focused mostly mostly on the Midwest.
You know, founded in 08, like I said, so going on about 16 years old today.
And we really focus on, you know, we don’t have a an MSP practice. We don’t sell printers on the side.
This is the thing that we do. So we consult with our clients to make good, good decisions at the end of the day on buying about five or so different technologies. It’s the stuff that, you know, big networks, contact center, cybersecurity, UC, and it gets data center collocation. And there’s, you know, products five through 12, but that’s probably about 80, 90 percent of our revenue right there.
We stayed pretty true to that stuff. You know, there have been a lot of things that try to grab our attention. You know, like we’re doing a lot of evaluation on AI. It looks like it might it’s it’s partly a it’s part of our context in our practice, but it’s also pulling us in this direction as well. So we’re looking at that. But we’re trying to stay core to the things that we can be really good at. So I’m going back to that to Jim Collins. He says, you know, what you know, what drives your economic engine? What are you passionate about? What can you be better at than everyone else? So I use those three principles when we talk about who we want to be when we grow up, because we’re only 16 years old. And I think we’ve got another 30, 30, 40 years left in us.
I love it.
Well, the next thing I want to get into then is kind of what’s what’s driving this, right? Taking what you’ve learned, leadership philosophies that you’ve learned, right? You mentioned some of the Jim Collins, some of the flywheel components. I mean, is there are those the core? Are there other leadership principles that kind of guide this this company’s growth, culture, mentors, things like that?
I’ll start there. There’s a there’s a couple of things I’ll actually start with something we’ve been doing just over the past year. And I’m going to give a lot of credit to my director of operations, Taylor. She she said, you know, we should we should probably do EOS. So entrepreneurial entrepreneurial operating system. We implemented that about about a year ago. So and what that does is that takes all the things that live in the back of the napkin and all the values and all the things that you should probably put on paper and formalize. It makes you do that. So so when we when we talk about values like we have those things ready to go, I’ll talk about some of those. You know, one of them is is just is curiosity. Like we want people who are just genuinely curious about life. You know, you talk we talked before about jobs. You talk about Benjamin Franklin. You talk about these people that have changed history, people that are extraordinary, what they do. And they don’t need you don’t even need to change history. But like if if you have that curiosity, I think you can be an amazing marketer, project manager,
you know, leader, seller, engineer, all that stuff. If you’re truly curious about what you do. So so one of them for me, one of them that I love is extreme ownership. There’s this book by Jocko Willink. Yes. And he just in it’s that and you have to read the book. I’m going to probably, you know, you know, the lesson is if anything goes wrong in your life.
Look inwards first. So the whole world is wants to
wants to wants to make their problems, everyone else’s problems. Hey, I these things didn’t happen in my life because this person did this. Society did that to me. And Jocko Willink says first, second and third. You look from within, you take ownership. So even if you are in a in a mission that fails
and you’re only 20 or 30 percent culpable, you own that 20 or 30 percent first before going out and talking about anybody else. So that is one of our values here.
So and I love that because that means we’re not walking around just pointing fingers at other people. This customer did this to me. This employee did this to me. This person did this to me. You take ownership for that stuff. And I truly do love that. So I could go through all of them. I’ll I won’t. You might have to do a lot of editing. The you know, maybe the one or two other things I might say would be just everything here is is long term based. You know, like think like going back to those days of working at Quest and at Sprint and at WorldCom, there’s always this like this hustle of like every month, every end of quarter, every end of year. There is just this.
You know, there’s this maniacal just oh, my gosh, like just run this. You know, just run as fast as you can. Don’t worry about January 1st. Only worry about today.
And I always think to myself, like, you know, results and money are lagging indicators of doing the right things.
So I don’t really think about anything in short term. Like I won’t lie to you. I don’t know when I. So what the end of the quarter is next month, the September 30th, the word September 31st, whenever the last day of September is just going to be another day. Yeah, it’s just going to be another day. That’s it.
And if you just have this constant.
This this constant rush and, you know, just
for short term things, for short term results, I think you ultimately burn people out. I do. And in one of the things that I think we’ve done a really good job at here is holding on to really good talent. You can make a business out of just acquiring great talent and holding on to it. If you can do that further, longer than your competitors, I don’t care.
It doesn’t matter if you want to sell what we sell or you want to sell this, you want to sell this or you want to sell these. It doesn’t matter. You can make a business out of that. So if you burn those people out with so much short term stuff all the time and you end up putting those gear, you know, that sand in those gears, you end up losing those people.
I don’t know. I think I don’t know if you’ll ever become a great company. I think you can make who knows? Maybe you can become a good company because your product is so good, but I don’t think you can become a great company. So like just everything is long term.
So I go on for a few more minutes, but I’d say those are some of the biggest.
Now, huge. I don’t think. Yeah, I don’t think the long term vision is looked at enough, regardless of what people’s even short term goals might be. Just play the long game, have patience.
Yeah, I can’t can agree with that more. And then I love the extreme ownership to thing as well. I think there is there is too much of that kind of victim mentality. Right. If we own it and get better.
Just all we’re going to do is get better at the end of the day. So I couldn’t agree with that more. It’s good stuff.
And that’s a societal problem to me. Like we’re we’re I mean, I feel like society is putting this upon people. So sometimes you have to even you find yourself even unwiring people from what society is putting in them. Yeah.
All right. Let’s talk about let’s talk about something difficult here. Let’s talk about a company challenge. So give me a major strategic challenge companies face and how did you navigate it?
Oh, man.
I will I’ll say this one.
Being a small company,
you can do everything in the back of a napkin.
So and there becomes a point when you can’t do the stuff on the back of the napkin anymore because the napkin just got too big and this napkin doesn’t work well with this napkin. And that is when you have a real company when you have too many napkins and you actually have to put all this together. And I call it the mousetrap because let’s just say for us, there’s 50 pieces in this mousetrap. When this piece moves, I’ve got to go do this and this and this. And when this piece changes, it changes all these other things. When you’re a small company, you can change something. You can almost do it. You can do it in a vacuum and it really won’t mess with too many things. But there is a point in time in our history when we’re like, OK, there’s way too many things in the back of napkins. And no one knows where we’re going. And they know what our values are, but simply because we.
We do them, but they’ve never really been talked about. And hey, here they are. Here they are on paper. And this is what you should base your decisions on. If there’s ever a doubt as to what you should do.
So.
This is this is a story of us essentially saying, OK, we’ve grown to this point. How are we going to run this company moving forward? And it’s really hard. And it’s at this point where someone says, you know what? I might sell out and let someone else go take care of this stuff because it’s really hard because everyone’s just used to like decisions being made on the fly. So at that point in time, this is now going out about 16 or so months ago. We just said, OK, we need to look at it at a better way to to run our company, everything from how you run meetings to how you pronounce goals and like, what are the things that are important? Where are we going? Putting all those things on paper. And that was when we we put in we put in EOS.
And we told everybody, hey, look, we told them this whole story, because like one of my values, one of my personal values is really transparency as well. It is we can’t do this forever. Everybody like we have to we have to come up with with a different way. So this star that the story for how we tackled this and how we tackled that next level of our company was just by being just.
Being vulnerable and telling everybody like I’ve only taken this as far as I can. The back of all these napkins are full. This is the first time I’ve ever done this before. I’m not some serial entrepreneur. This isn’t my fifth company. So I think if you if you start with that humility and that vulnerability, people fall, people will follow you like if they if they feel like that.
And I think that’s that’s what we try to do here. So we started with that humility. We started that with that vulnerability. And we and we knew that we had to formalize that stuff that was on the back of napkins. So leadership did this for about we picked an implementer. We started for about four or five months on our own and then we rolled this out. And we just said, guys, guys and girls, we are going to break vases and we are going to we’re going to screw up all kinds of stuff. But I need you to hold on for all this, because I think the place that we’re going to ultimately get to is going to be better than where we are. So and that was really hard because it was it was this constant. It was a daily thing of, well, hang on here. We’re doing this thing, new thing over here.
That’s not how we did things over here. And it was always this I know. And you know what? I’m not even going to guarantee you that this new way is going to work.
But we’re going to try this. And I need you to put forth full effort on this, because if it fails, I need to know if it was your effort or the idea that failed. So and if you don’t put forth effort, I have two variables here. I need to get to one. So I have to have full effort. I have to have full commitment on.
Yeah, that’s a that’s a man. That’s a really important thing, because I think you nobody tells you. Nobody tells you when it’s about to get really hard to do the way that you’ve been doing it before. These things just kind of creep in and happen. And then you just have this moment where you go.
That is that that doesn’t work the way that it did before. Right. To your point, the napkins get full. And some people, that’s 10 employees, some people, that’s 100 employees, 20. You know, it’s just different in every situation. But, you know, the fact that that I think you recognize it, it goes into this idea of challenge, it goes into this idea of innovation.
But what we’ve heard too often is, OK, I made a pivot. I tried it and it didn’t work. Well, how long did you try it? Well, you know, I tried it for a week or, you know, two people tried it. Did those two people really give their all? Did you measure it? Do you have data to prove it? Did we test it, you know, with 100 people? You know, do you have a true data set? I love that. I think that’s a huge call out because then you’re right. I mean, this is a this is still as long as some of us feel like we might have been in this space. It’s still a really young industry. And it’s where it’s certainly where distribution and technology procurement is going. Right. So I love that we’re all right at the epicenter where this thing is heading towards.
But again, this it’s the first time in some of these instances. And so we’ve got to have we’ve got to measure those things to your point to go. Well, we’re trying to do these things. The industry is changing and we’re trying to adapt around it. Right. So, you know, you’ve got to measure those and test those. But you’ve got you’ve got changing paradigm shifts on the outside. Right.
Yeah, it is is very interesting to be in an industry that itself is constantly changing while you’re changing then as well. Like these are two things you have to balance at the same time.
And it’s the reason why most most folks get bucked off that horse. Yeah.
Yeah.
All right. So let’s talk about, you know, as an entrepreneur, founder, president, what for other partners listening to this, they’re wanting to kind of build up a business or maybe struggling to build or getting ready to build. What’s the advice? What’s your advice that you’d give them in this?
For starting a company and being an entrepreneur.
The first one is, is like.
If I would unless you can build a company by yourself and do this all by yourself,
you need to care about people.
And what I mean by that is like you want to go build a company and you you hire five folks, you hire 10 people, you hire 20 people.
If if you don’t really care, like truly care, like wake up every day and if you and care about those people, don’t don’t be an entrepreneur. Really don’t go be a high level. I see somewhere where you are the focus of you. But if you build a successful organization,
I think that most people within that organization will say that the leadership cares about you.
And if that doesn’t come naturally to you, then don’t do it. So I feel like I’ve worked for people where they are a manager or a leader, but they’re but they’re trying to figure out they’re trying to max out maximize their own comp plan. They’re they’re worried about they’re worried about themselves. And like I always say that, like, you know, money and results are even that are a lagging indicator of having the right people and trust in leaders and those people feeling like they can they’re going to go to the depths of hell with you.
So I would just say you need to care about people and that that’s got to be something where it’s just like it’s not surface. It’s got to be deep.
So that would be that’d be probably the first thing I would say. The second thing I would tell you is even if you haven’t started the company yet, I would do this. And I started doing this shortly after my shortly after I started C3 is you go to all these people that, you know,
you’ve had all these career stops before you actually get to be an entrepreneur. And you know who the really, really good people are.
And you go to those people even before you start a company and you say, there’s going to be a time where I might start a company and I don’t know at what point I’m going to give you a call, but I would like you to be a part of that. And if even if you don’t end up starting a company one day, why isn’t that a nice compliment you’re going to get from somebody? Somebody walks around, says, yeah, they would want me to be the second mate on that ship. That’s that sounds pretty cool.
Do that. Go to the people that you know you would want on your boat if if you were even to start a company and plant those seeds. To this day, I’ve got hundreds of seeds out there. Most of them won’t grow. Most of them won’t, but you’re going to get a few. And those people are going to remember that conversation.
So you start having those conversations even before you start the company.
And and yeah, a few of those few of those will grow.
So the G’s beyond that. I mean, those are those are the first two that come to mind. When you first start, I love this. I got some advice. He’s like, hey, this was a guy that’s been in our space. And he said, some people are going to tell you to go get a website and some people are going to tell you you’ve got to go have your business plan. And some people are going to go tell you this. He just says, are you ready for this? This is the first thing you should do when you’re when you’re starting your company. Go sell.
Go sell right now. Don’t worry about everything else. Go sell. And what’s funny to me is like the first like three or four months at C3, I had a hot meal account, you know, like I didn’t even have my domain yet. And I was just like and I was just like I was inspired by this guy’s like, yeah, yeah, I got to go do that. That makes sense to me. I got to go get I got to get this flywheel going. So like no matter what industry you’re in, it doesn’t matter if it’s our industry, you’re going to be a florist or whatever. Like go sell day one. You got to go get revenue in the door. So don’t worry about much else. Go sell.
Yeah, yeah, I love that.
Again, another book reference here. I learned that, you know, and kind of seeing partners and build and what what people want to focus on, what they should focus on and things like that. Nothing happens until you sell something. And so I couldn’t agree more in that. Don’t get sidetracked. Grant Cardone’s got a good book out there. It was one of the first ones I read back in the trying to understand some of these things. He’s got the 10 X mentality. So people, you know, Cliff notes is people dramatically underestimate the amount of time, energy and effort and money that it takes to be successful. If you’re going to do this thing and you think it’s going to take, you know, 50 cold calls, it’s probably going to take 500 or whatever. You think it’s going to take 50 bucks. It’s probably going to take 500. And so I think people grossly misunderestimate that. So I just focus. Just go sell. I love that. Sounds like the simplest advice, but it’s probably one of the most valuable things that we can help. Don’t worry about all this other crap. Just go sell stuff. I love it.
And it’s funny because like I’ve I’ve coached some other entrepreneurs like even outside of our space. And I tell most folks that, you know, if you’re the world’s best engineer or you’re the world’s best, you know, architect or whatever, and you start your own company, congratulations. Your number one job now is you’re a salesperson. So you have to sell this to your your customers and you have to sell this idea to other people so that they’ll ultimately work for you as well. You are a salesperson. So and that’s to me, one of the reasons why very successful people, very smart people fail at being an entrepreneur because they fail to realize that the first thing you’ve got to be good at as an entrepreneur is sales.
Love it. All right. So let’s talk about let’s talk about decision making. You know, you got it seems like sometimes every day there’s high stakes decisions, right? There’s fires or there’s there’s whatever it might be. But what’s what’s your approach to to these high stakes decision makings when it’s it’s an area that maybe you haven’t tackled before?
All right. There’s a couple things that come to mind.
So openness is one of them openness, like even to a fault. It’s almost like, you know, like free speech, like if you’re not sure free speech should be free, should this be restricted? Whenever something’s in question, it should be free speech. The same thing when it comes to decision making here. It’s like if I’m not sure about openness, I should be open. So even to a fault. So I probably say too much of the things that are going on in my head.
But I’ll just say this. It makes decision making and even living life easier. If you’re just like, this is how I operate. This is this is me as an open book. So I operate on this premise of openness. And that makes you that you if you’re going to be that open, you’re even thinking about the things that are going on in your mind. You have to have that vulnerability. You know, like I don’t go around saying I’m right 100 percent of the time. It is this is this is what I think this is what I’ve done. These are results. I might have screwed this up over here, over there. If you can go in and admit fault on things you’ve done, things you’ve thought, other people think, oh, well, he doesn’t think he walks on water. I can actually have a real conversation.
So I think of openness. I hinted at this at this one, the second one being being humility. So it it’s not something it’s not something you can fake. So you have to truly go into these situations knowing that maybe you have more experience, maybe you have more knowledge, but maybe this other person has this other point of view. Maybe they have something to bring that I simply don’t know. And you know what, there is going to be faults in my own thinking as well. So I go into this just with this level of humility. And I try to take all the defensiveness I would ever have because someone is going to challenge my ideas and they’re going to say, this is how I did something in the past. And here are some of the things that have worked for me. And if you can’t turn that that defensiveness off and you and and practice humility,
then I think you’ll only be as good of a leader as the ideas that are in your own head. You know, it stunts your growth. So that humility and that openness and just not being defensive. So someone says something that gets onto your skin that rankles your feathers a little bit.
Let that go. Like it’s it’s it’s not going to help you in getting where you need to go to.
I love that. Don’t be defensive. And I think in some instances, it’s just sleep on it. Just sleep on it. I think some of the things that I’ve learned from great mentors myself are just sleep on it. Pause. Remember that you may have to work with this person for the next 20 years. They may be your boss tomorrow. You may be their boss. They may need to hire you. You may need to, you know, whatever the case is, obviously, it goes to this kind of don’t burn bridges mentality. But I think if you embody all of these things and and to your point, I’d love the humility angle because we don’t we don’t have all the answers. And we try to surround ourselves with great people. So we should trust those people. Right. If we’re not, then we’re surrounding ourselves with the wrong people. So I love the humility. And don’t be defensive. I love that.
You said that the the sleep on a rule. And you know, this is interesting because we call it the 24 hour rule because like sometimes you just get all worked up and like my director of operations. I love the phrase. She says sometimes I just want to go keyboard warrior on somebody, you know, and and we’ve just said, you know what, if you get really worked up and something can wait for a day, let it wait for a day. And if you feel the same way the next day, then go do that thing. But sometimes gets so worked up, like, oh, I do declare my delicate sensibilities have been offended. And then you just call keyboard warrior. And then you’re like, oh, did I really mean that? Did I just get all worked up? So I say it’s a great point. That’s that’s a very good point.
All right. So let’s shift. Let’s shift here. We got about 15 minutes. Let’s shift this in. We got a lot we could we could it’s a good topic here. We’re going to get into personal growth. So you yourself, we were talking about this a little before we got started. How have you continued to grow, develop as a leader, resources, experiences? Let’s go through that.
Oh, man. Personal growth.
It was about one of my sales guys had hired a sales coach and he was a sales and business coach. It worked very well for him. So I decided to adopt him for myself and actually the rest of the organization. So I have a guy who sits on give props to John Clemson is a guy’s name. And he sits outside the organization and he’s not responsible for a number. You know, it’s like he has no, you know, he doesn’t have a stake in the company, but he he has gotten to understand the organization, the personalities in myself. And he will help guide some of the more difficult decisions that we have to make. So having a mentor, having a coach.
Go do that thing. Like I feel like this is the thing that everyone talks about and very few people actually go do.
So so that’s that’s one thing that that I’ve done. That’s that’s quite high on my list. I probably talk to mine.
We try and talk about once a week, if we can sometimes turns in every other week. But it’s it’s it’s always that’s always been very good for myself as well.
I have it all blurred out now, but I’m big on books. So I love the I love history books. We talked about history before, Josh, biographies, business books.
You know, there’s there is a there’s a huge number of of outstanding books out there. And I’m big on Audible. So one of my keys to life is just go get a book and put at one point four speed. So it all works out. They sound a little Mickey Mouse, but it all it all works out. But like what I find it what I find extraordinary is, you know, you read a book on Steve Jobs, you read a book on Benjamin Franklin, Elon Musk, all these different people, Michael Jordan, Phil Knight. And you’re like, you find some of these common threads amongst people in different geographies, different parts of the world. And they’re doing they’re doing something similar.
And that’s when I start when I feel like you get a few more puzzles, puzzle pieces in this universe, when you can find these things that these guys say in completely different fields and you’re like, oh, my gosh, that’s one of these secrets to life. And I’ll give you a small dumb one. Now, these come from a podcast, but like I have I have a treadmill. So right here, I’m on the thing for three hours a day. So why? Because I’m I’m listening to these podcasts and one of them was the entrepreneurs and just like big business people there interviewed.
And one of the questions is always, where do you come up with your best ideas?
And they asked Bill Gates, this Mark Zuckerberg and a few other people now said, well, it’s when I’m walking around and I’m going to do this and go and do that. And I’m like, I sit for like nine hours a day.
So I take calls when I’m walking on this. I take calls outside walking this walking this dog named Bob all around my neighborhood. And I constantly have this blood going. And so anyway, it’s just like one of those things I’ve learned along the way. But I’m I’m big on on reading and listening to people that have done this before and have been there and have done that.
I’d say that the third one is building a is building a peer group. So I have several peers that I feel like I can share myself and the struggles that I have and not not a mentor necessarily, but but but a group of peers. And and that’s really helped me because these are folks that have some of some of the very similar similar struggles. So I would say those are those are the things that that come to mind for for my personal growth development.
I love it. I love it. And I want to double down on a couple of these things. First of all, I love that your dog’s name is Bob. I think that’s awesome.
It’s crazy little dog is nine pounds. I mean, if there was like an Olympics for dogs, he would dominate. He would be Usain Bolt in the in Dog Olympics.
So anyway, I don’t know. But but you there’s a couple of things I want to call back on because I’ve been reading a lot of this stuff lately. And, you know, one of the things that Buffett and Munger had was just leaving a ton of empty space in their calendar for thinking. And I know that sounds how can that, you know, if I don’t have 25 meetings a day, I’m not effective. No, your role changes over time as the entrepreneur, as the owner, you know, at these different levels. And if you can’t have time to just stop and pause and think about what’s next, think about this complicated decision. And I love the walking around idea. And so so that’s couldn’t agree more with that. The second thing is, as you as you start to I don’t care if you listen to this podcast or you read this book or you find this biography, you find this common thread, everything kind of pulls together. You know, you it started off for me seeing how, you know, OK, this person studied Steve Jobs. All right. Well, what did what did Steve Jobs? How did he learn? You know, who did who did he surround himself with? He cold called was a Bill Packard at the beginning to look for for some resistors. To just he was not afraid. Right. Well, who else? Who did he study as he moved on? He studied Edwin Land. Right. So what did Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid did? Edwin Land went and said, you know what? I’m going to go to the Stanford library. I’m really passionate about this. And I’m going to read every single book they have on light.
Who else is going to do that? Right. How how are you not? This is the second person that I was reading about. The other one yesterday was Thomas Edison, where he didn’t go to the law. He didn’t grow up in a spot where he had a great learning environment. It was it was progressively he had the opportunities to. And he didn’t go and read a book. His quote was, I went and I read the library. Right. How can you not be great when you can just listen and learn from all of these other things, all of these other successful people? And you sprinkle in some people, you know, the the leaders of the world, maybe some controversial people of the world. Still, it goes back to, I think, the earlier point that you brought up of we’ve got to listen to all of these things. We’ve got to find out who we’re surrounding ourself with that can teach us how to grow and be better and then who is probably somebody to not model ourselves after, but what can I learn from that mistake that they made so that I don’t make that or I can improve on this product and make it better. So I love. Yes, read. Love the walking thing. I think that’s awesome. There’s so much to be gleaned here.
And some of the things that come to mind is like, you know, you said Edison just walked in and he read the library. Like to me, that means this is someone who has this insatiable curiosity about everything, you know, like I will tell you, like the architects of the world are the people that are that are these curious beings. They walk around, they want to understand, they never turn that thing off in their mind of how things work and how things could could be a little bit better.
And by the way, there’s there’s one other point I wanted to hit because we mentioned jobs once or twice, and I love this because it kind of goes into some of the themes we’ve talked about earlier. They ask jobs what it like, what is most important accomplishment was. And you’re thinking yourself the iPhone, you’re thinking yourself this or that. And he says the team of people that that created the Mac, not the Mac, the team of people that built that. And I was just like, oh, oh, that’s good. That’s so good. Yeah, it’s so, so good. That was just like one of those like tingly moments where it’s like that guy has figured out what this mosaic of universe is actually made of. Like and he’s like, he’s figured this out. I love it.
I love it. All right. So final couple thoughts here.
Walk us through any maybe something that started as a perceived failure and then led to a successor, really just some key learning for you.
Oh, I always talk to folks that
in hiring here, I’ve kissed a lot of frogs.
So everyone sees all the princes here, princes and princesses, but I’ve kissed a lot of frogs to get here.
And I think when I think of my my greatest failures, I it is it’s having to do with people and hiring the wrong people. If there’s a silver lining to that, though, the organization starts to understand who we are when we don’t let those kinds of people hang out for long.
So if you do that, all the Navy SEALs you have around are like,
I don’t really feel like I’m in a group of people that are as badass as I am. So so I think of those I think of those failures in that way. And now who we go after our hiring process, how long they stay here. All of those things are this outgrowth of failures from having brought on the wrong people. And don’t get me wrong. Like like we’ll hire for 30 years and 30, 40 years. And I am assuming we’ll make more and more to say, you know, more and more mistakes. But like I think we’re getting better at it. And if you can do this thing where you hold on to good talent, but let the folks go that this isn’t the best fit for that is a that’s a that’s that’s monumental. It’s absolutely monumental. So I would say those biggest failures, though, are bringing on the the bring on the wrong people. And sometimes you hold on those wrong people for too long. And yeah, and yeah, hiring and bring on the right people is probably that big lesson I’ve learned from that.
I love it. Yes. Couldn’t agree with that more to spend a lot of time on hiring. It’s a long, it’s tedious process. And if you wanted to, you could breeze through it real quick. But kills the culture. And yeah, just echoing all of that double down on that. Spend a lot of time on it. We could we could run a whole session on on hiring. For sure. There’s a lot to get right there. It’s important.
I think of like almost I’ve talked to people that have these really successful organizations, and I think we’ve done pretty well. So I’m going to put it I’m going to put us in some group here. But and I just say, imagine that you still have the 10 or 15 people that you’ve let go as a part of your organization if they were still here and you then just go, oh, gosh, like it just puts a layer of of over this amazing over this amazing thing that you’ve built. So you have to let those people go. But I think if you do this with heart and you let people go with heart and you know, and you don’t just.
If you deal with heart, everything will be just fine, but you have to. You can’t let them hang out for too long. For sure.
All right. Final thoughts. So let’s let’s look forward, right? Let’s look forward and look back the legacy, the impact, you know, in this five, 10, 15, 40 years from now. Right. And in this role, what impact
do you hope to have had on the industry?
Um, I think about it more in terms of like impact on people.
But as far as impact on the industry, this I don’t know, I feel like I’m going to answer your question, but I feel like that’s for the industry to decide. So I I don’t I don’t necessarily walk in with that being what I think about.
If I think about the impact on on specific people, I want. You know, everyone’s had those jobs, those careers, those missteps. I want really talented people to feel like I can come here for 20 or 30 years and help grow something and be a part of something special and it could be fulfilling. It could be fun. I’m going to enjoy a life that I’m going to be a better person, a better father, a better, a better wife to other people. I think about my impact like one person at a time and and and providing for them this living and giving them these chances that maybe someone else in the world won’t give them.
So and I think about that. And I’m I’m hoping that that those people want to stick around here and then maybe actually even mentor other people that come into this organization as well. So it’s almost like I don’t even go into this thinking, like, how can I change the world? I’m just thinking, how can I change like the closest 50 people to me? And then if we all go into this world thinking, I’m just going to focus on the people that are closest to me, I don’t have to worry about the world because the world is going to take care of itself.
So I don’t know. I never really thought about until you asked me that question about, like, what do I think my impact on the industry is going to be? I’m not sure. But I don’t I don’t concern myself with it as much as I concern myself with the people that are here because like there’s no there’s no alternate universe where I don’t do the best that I can for the people here.
And maybe I don’t make as big of an impact on the industry. And the converse would be I don’t take good care of my people, but I make this huge impact on the industry. That to me wouldn’t be success. I would feel terrible about that. That that wouldn’t that wouldn’t feel good to me.
So I feel like I’m avoiding your question.
No, no.
You answered it.
You actually I mean, look, there’s no wrong answers here, but you answered it in in I think a unique way because
it shows obviously where that it shows where your heart is. Right. Your heart is with your people as it should be to drive and help and make them better. And I think that indirectly by helping and building and growing and creating this life, this this this thing that people see value in, they feel good, they’re growing, they’re helping.
And as they go and mentor others and they they they do the things that they do,
I think it does have impact on the broader everything.
And we hope those things certainly transcend down into the broader industry, the broader culture.
I think it’s our job to to just help people find the best versions of themselves. And I think you know, you’re you’re doing a bang up job of it. And I think it shows kind of where your heart and where your focus is. So, no, that was it was not the wrong answer. That was a great answer.
I love that phrase. If you can help someone become the best version of themselves, I love that. So if that’s something that you’re doing in your daily life, bravo to you, because there’s only so many people in this world that think that think like that.
Love it. Good stuff, man. All right. Look, I we we could have gone on. I know we could have gone on a lot more stuff. We’re both passionate about a lot of these things. But Matthew Toth, C3 founder, president, I really appreciate you coming on, man, dropping some of these nuggets for us. I enjoyed the conversation, Josh. Thank you. Awesome. All right, everybody.
That wraps us up for this week. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Matthew Toth, founder and president at C3. Until next time, everybody.